An Interview with Ivana Bodrožic, Author of The Hotel Tito

November 07

We sat down with Ivana Bodrožic, author of The Hotel Tito, to discuss why there is no such thing as "displaced children," subconscious literary influences, and her next book from Seven Stories, a political thriller called Pits that will arrive in 2020. Pardon the shakiness of the footage and the vertical video—we're working on our cinematography skills!

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Where We Are Now and How We Got Here

How Did We Get Here?

On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 7–2 decision known as Roe v. Wade that a pregnant person has the constitutional right to an abortion under that person’s right to privacy. The ruling struck down all state abortion bans as unconstitutional, ending what was a growing patchwork of abortion legality that changed from state to state, ranging from legal in all circumstances to no abortion whatsoever.

The victory didn’t last long. While the framework of Roe required that each state must make abortion legal until the point of fetal viability (then assumed to be at around twenty-eight weeks’ gestation, or by the beginning of the third trimester), and after that if the pregnancy poses a threat to the pregnant person’s health, state and federal legislators immediately jumped in to see how quickly they could limit that decision with restrictions to the procedure itself.

The biggest, earliest blow was the federal Hyde Amendment, introduced by Illinois Republican congressman Henry Hyde. Hyde, who was virulently opposed to abortion, proposed making it illegal for Medicaid to cover any abortions that were not medically indicated to save the life of a pregnant person. At the time, he said, “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman. Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the . . . Medicaid bill.” That was 1976, and the amendment has been reaffirmed every year since, with a rape exception (the ability to obtain an abortion if a person becomes pregnant as a result of a sexual assault) being the only change to the ban.

This targeting of the poor has had the greatest impact on pregnant people of color. Because of deep-rooted and systemic racial inequality, they are far more likely to be using government insurance, and hence more likely to be blocked from obtaining abortion care without large out-of-pocket costs. As a result, approximately one in four pregnant Medicaid users seeking to terminate end up carrying to term simply because the financial burden is too great. Meanwhile, abortion opponents celebrate the “life-saving work” of the Hyde Amendment, referring to the increase in the birthrate among those on Medicaid that occurred in the decades since the amendment passed, the clear sign that the amendment served its purpose in blocking the poor from obtaining wanted abortions because of the insurmountable costs.

But passing the federal Hyde Amendment was just the first step. States also began restricting abortion access, creating barriers such as mandatory waiting periods, attempted gestational bans halfway through pregnancy, requirements on where abortions could be performed and who could perform them, parental notification requirements for minors seeking care, and even a rule requiring a wife to get permission from her husband to terminate a pregnancy.

It was this influx of rules that worked its way up to the Supreme Court in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and led to the current trimester system and the idea of “undue burden.” In the Casey decision, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot ban abortion outright in the first trimester, although they can put laws in place if those laws are meant to protect the health and well-being of the person trying to end the pregnancy. In the second trimester, restrictions can be more involved and must balance the rights of the pregnant person with the growing interests of the fetus. By the third trimester—post–fetal viability—abortion should only be allowed in cases that protect the health of the person who is pregnant. And all of these rules should not place an “undue burden” on one’s ability to obtain an abortion in the first place.

“Undue burden” became a term that abortion opponents decided to push to the limit. Beginning slowly, they proposed incremental state laws such as parental notification and consent requirements for minors seeking terminations, and “informed consent” bills with a mandatory waiting period between receiving information about the abortion from the clinic and the actual procedure—a process that was often allowed to be completed over the phone rather than face-to-face with clinic staff when first introduced. These incremental bills didn’t cause immediate hardship for the majority of abortion seekers (although they did begin the process of creating ever higher hurdles for the young and the poor). Instead, they set the stage for drawing out how long it takes to schedule, travel, and obtain an actual abortion, and for introducing false or questionable “facts” as part of the medical process.

Then in 2011 everything shifted. Fresh off the Tea Party’s sweep of the Congress and state legislatures, model legislation crafted by anti-abortion groups like Americans United for Life and National Right to Life spread across the country and passed—primarily in red states and areas already suffering from a lack of clinic access. These bills—twenty-week abortion bans, six-week heartbeat bans, bans on second-trimester dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortions, mandatory waiting periods (allegedly to offer that person a chance to potentially change their mind) that stretch seventy-two hours or longer and must be done in person, requiring multiple trips to a clinic, medication abortion bans, admitting privileges requirements mandating a clinic or a doctor providing abortions must have a relationship with a local hospital in case of a patient complication (a rule that often shuts down clinics because no hospital will work with them, either for legal reasons or for fear of protests), and even total abortion bans from the moment of conception—have proliferated year after year, cumulating in more than four hundred restrictions in the last eight years alone.

The Right has two goals. First, they want to bring at least one of these model bills to the Supreme Court in order to overturn Roe and let states have the ability to make abortion illegal within their borders. Second, they want to try to get enough political power to control the House, Senate, White House, and two-thirds of the state legislatures all at the same time, so they can create and ratify an amendment to the US Constitution that declares “personhood” and the right to life begin at the moment of conception, banning all abortion (and possibly hormonal birth control) throughout the country.

This book primarily addresses the first scenario, although some chapters can serve as a resource for the second one, too. But if we do eventually end up in a country where people can no longer end or even prevent unwanted pregnancies, we will need more than a handbook—we will need an outright revolution.

What Will Happen Next?

For the immediate future, now that we have a new ultra-conservative majority on the Supreme Court due to the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, there are four ways—three likely and one unlikely—that the reduction or even end of legal abortion access in the US may work out. Here are all of the scenarios.

Likely

A case makes it to the Supreme Court within the next few years that allows the bench to overturn Roe, and they do.

There are already a number of cases in lower state courts and appeals circuits that could be reviewed at the SCOTUS level, allowing the court to rule on the issue in the very near future. Plus, if a federal twenty-week abortion ban were passed and signed into law, it would immediately be sent to the Supreme Court for review if anyone chose to challenge it.

If the court rules that abortion legality should be left to the states to decide through any of these cases, that ends Roe and allows the trigger laws (laws on the books in certain states that immediately make abortion illegal if Roe is overturned) to go into effect, and opens the door for total bans in other states.

The Supreme Court rules that there is still a constitutional right to an abortion, but that the viability standard is outdated and “fetal pain” should be the new standard.

If a state or federal twenty-week ban (twenty weeks into pregnancy being the point at which abortion opponents claim a fetus can “feel pain” in the womb, although the vast majority of medical experts disagrees with that statement) is heard by the court, the conservatives could rule that “fetal pain” makes a better point in the pregnancy at which a fetus’s right to life outweighs the rights of the person carrying it to terminate, undoing the “viability” standard that has been in place since Roe but still technically leaving abortion legal.

If this happens, anti-abortion policy makers and legislators are prepared to pass bills stating that fetal pain actually begins far earlier in the pregnancy, as early as six weeks’ gestation. This will allow states to effectively ban abortion if they choose to, without actually violating the constitutional right to an abortion.

There’s also the possibility that the court will simply refuse to hear any cases involving abortion whatsoever, going utterly silent on the issue. Because the state and federal judiciaries have been packed with conservative justices, especially since President Donald Trump was elected, states could very easily decide to pass the most restrictive laws they can short of an outright ban, and as long as a federal judge sides with them and the Supreme Court refuses to hear a challenge, they will stay in place.

In many ways this could be a very appealing scenario for conservative politicians, allowing some states to ban abortion without the potential blowback from voters that would come from putting a full ban in place. If a restriction is so limiting that no clinics are left open, abortion is no longer available in that state even if it is technically legal. If a state bans abortion after a heartbeat can be heard, but clinics will not do a termination before that point because they need to be sure there is enough development visible to ensure it is not ectopic, that ends abortion. All SCOTUS needs to do is refuse to do anything at all.

Unlikely but Still Possible

The court could hear an abortion case and decide that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees a right to life to all and that outweighs the right to privacy found in Roe. Abortion is now illegal everywhere.

This one seems the least likely, as it would be too much of a change too fast and would guarantee the end of the GOP as a political power. It could happen eventually, but not unless the Republican Party gets to a point where it is so embedded in its majorities that it never needs to fear reelection again.

What Does This Mean for the Clinics Left Behind?

With the clinics that do remain, being able to book an appointment will be more difficult than ever. In Texas, when clinics closed because of the passage of the Texas Omnibus Abortion Bill (HB 2), which required all abortion providers to have local hospital admitting privileges, those few remaining clinics that could still operate were telling patients of wait times of up to a month before they could come in to end a pregnancy. While some of those clinics reopened after the Supreme Court ruled HB 2 was an undue burden on the right to an abortion, that period is a stark foreshadowing of what America could look like post-Roe.

Plus, if abortion is only available in certain states, abortion opponents will increase their presence at those clinics that do remain, hoping to close them one by one. With fewer clinics to concentrate on, the “sidewalk counseling,” protests, street preaching, and monitoring for alleged medical violations will increase in frequency, especially in states bordering those where abortion is illegal.

That also means that it will be far more difficult for those patients who need care to get inside. Besides the sea of bodies that encircles some abortion clinics currently—made up of both those who oppose abortion and those who are trying to help a patient access a clinic—an increased presence of protesters can often bring additional security or police, a situation that creates a far more volatile environment for those who are undocumented, who are of communities of color, or who have other reasons to mistrust officers. Escorts have reported experiences with patients who were afraid to enter clinics, worried that the law enforcement that was outside attempting to maintain order in more aggressive protests was actually there to search or arrest patients. For some patients, the presence of security can be just as intimidating as a screaming preacher or a gory abortion photo.

We will discuss the efforts of protesters at clinics later in the book.

What Happens When Abortion Is Illegal?

Abortion opponents frequently say it is overblown to claim that making abortion illegal puts those who can become pregnant in physical danger. You can expect them to consistently bring up Ireland having one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world despite decades under a total abortion ban (a ban that the general population overwhelmingly voted to toss out in a national referendum in 2018).

What the anti-abortion advocates ignore is that in Ireland, people frequently obtained abortions despite the ban, either by leaving to get a termination across the border in a country with less restrictive laws, or by obtaining medication through the mail to terminate in private. It was only those who could not do so—immigrants who couldn’t leave the country, the poor, those trying to hide their pregnancies from partners or family members—who were forced to carry to term.

That same trend occurs throughout the world when it comes to abortion being illegal—it does not stop people from seeking it, it only divides them into those who have the resources to find a safe abortion where it is legal, and those who attempt illegal abortions with a variety of success.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, an international reproductive rights policy nonprofit, in Latin America and the Caribbean, where abortion is highly restricted or completely illegal in nearly every country, an estimated 6.5 million abortions still occur every year, at a rate of 44 per 1,000 women. Of those abortions, only one-fourth are considered “safe” abortions—i.e., abortions conducted using World Health Organization (WHO) protocols and carried out by trained providers. There are on average approximately 760,000 complications from unsafe abortions per year, and in 2014 approximately 10 percent of maternal deaths in that region (900 fatalities) were caused by unsafe abortions.

Lack of access to safe, legal abortion does and will continue to kill those who have unwanted pregnancies—and it will be marginalized communities lacking the financial resources to find alternative methods that will suffer the most. Removing abortion restrictions and other barriers—especially financial ones—so people can terminate in trained medical settings if they choose to is always the best option, and the one we should be fighting for. But there are also ways to make obtaining abortions outside a medical setting safer, both physically and legally, and we will discuss these later in the book.

Cutie straightened out the car and grinned. ‘Knowed that for a long time,’ she said.

‘Knowed which? That we was kissin’ cousins?’

‘Uh uh, that come later. About the safe part. You weren’t never very predictable, Bet, even as a child.’

Big Betty and Miss Cutie had spent the week in New Orleans, then the weekend in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and were headed back into Florida at Perdido Key. The Gulf of Mexico was smooth as glass this breezeless, sunny morning in February.

‘Jesus H. Christ, Cutie, tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day!’

‘So?’

‘We’ll have to make somethin’ special happen.’

‘Last Valentine’s we was locked up at Fort Sumatra. Spent the whole day bleachin’ blood and piss stains outta sheets.’

‘Still can’t believe we survived three and change in that pit.’

‘Don’t know if I’d made it without you, Bet. Them big ol’ mamas been usin’ me for toilet paper, you weren’t there to protect me.’

Big Betty shifted her five-foot-eight, two-hundred-pound body around in the front passenger seat so that she faced Cutie Early. At twenty-four, Cutie was twelve years younger than Betty, and Miss Cutie’s slim-figured five-foot-one-inch frame engendered in Big Betty a genuinely maternal feeling. They had been lovers ever since Miss Cutie had tiptoed into Big Betty’s cell at the Fort Sumatra Detention Center for Wayward Women, which was located midway between Mexico Beach and Wewahitchka, Florida, just inside the central time zone. Cutie’s curly red hair, freckles, giant black eyes and delicate features were just what Betty Stalcup had been looking for. It was as if the state of Florida penal system had taken her order and served it up on a platter. Big Betty brushed back her own shoulder-length brown hair with her left hand and placed her other hand on Cutie’s right breast, massaging it gently.

‘You’re my baby black-eyed pea, that’s for sure,’ said Betty. ‘We ain’t never gonna be apart if I can help it.’

‘Suits me.’

‘Cutie, we just a couple Apaches ridin’ wild on the lost highway, the one Hank Williams sung about.’

‘Don’t know that I’ve ever heard of it.’

‘Travelin’ along the way we are, without no home or reason to be or stay anywhere, that’s what it means bein’ on the lost highway. Most folks don’t know what they want, Cutie, only mostly they don’t even know that much. Sometimes they think they know but it’s usually just their stomach or cunt or cock complainin’. They get fed or fucked and it’s back to square one. Money makes ’em meaner’n shit, don’t we already know. Money’s the greatest excuse in the world for doin’ dirt. But you and me can out-ugly the sumbitches, I reckon.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Just by puttin’ two and two together, sweet pea, then subtractin’ off the top, one at a time.’

‘I ain’t sure I understand you, Bet, but I’m willin’ to learn.’

Big Betty threw back her head, shut her wolfslit green eyes and gave out a sharp laugh.

‘Young and willin’s the best time of life,’ she said. ‘You got to play it that way till you can’t play it no more.’

‘Then what?’ asked Cutie.

Big Betty grinned, threw her heavy left arm around Cutie’s narrow shoulders and squeezed closer to her companion.

Seven Stories is celebrating the last few weeks of 2018 with our biggest sale of the year! From now until January 1st, 2019, enjoy 50% off almost all our titles, along with free shipping to anywhere in the U.S. Each discounted book purchased before January 1st comes with a complimentary e-book version of the same title, so you can read it in whatever format you prefer. Whether you’re buying holiday gifts for friends and family or shopping for yourself, you’re bound to find something great. Check out our featured collections of half-price titles below to get started, or else browse our books page to search by date, imprint, or subject.

An unassuming historian who changed our basic assumptions about history, Howard Zinn made his greatest subject not war but peace. After his experience as a bombardier in World War II, he became convinced that there could be no such thing as a “just war,” as the vast majority of modern warfare’s victims are innocent civilians.

Perhaps no other small press has brought to light so many titles that moneyed interests have wanted to keep down—for reasons of censorship, squeamishness, or just bad blood. From Gary Webb's Dark Alliance, which drew links between the CIA and the crack cocaine explosion in the '90s, to Noam Chomsky's 9-11, read by millions but ignored by major U.S. papers when it was originally published in November, 2001, to Angela Davis's Abolition Democracy, which discusses the abolition of prison as well as Davis's own incarceration, and her experiences as "enemy of the state," here is a collection of books that are sure to provoke.

In the beginning, there was the word . . . . Then after that, there were graphic novels. (At least we think that's how the gospel goes.) From the groundbreaking Graphic Canon of Literature series to Elizabeth Swados's moving and hilarious My Depression, you can find our great illustrated and artistic books of all stripes in this collection.

A healthy body and a healthy planet go hand in hand. The titles in this collection span topical scientific advancements, environmental activism, exposés of past and present controversial chemical usages, and methods for fostering a stronger connection with nature, even as society seems to be further from the natural world than ever before.

In the age of online retailers and large corporate bookstores, independent booksellers can find themselves struggling to keep up. That’s why Seven Stories Press is partnering with indie bookstores for a series of new promotions to encourage readers to buy our books in ways that benefit both booksellers and publishers. The collaboration began in August, with Seven Stories offering indie bookstores a unique discount on a collection of seven themed titles. The first two collections were “For Human Rights, Against War” and “Women in Translation.” The same collections were also featured on the Seven Stories website.

To go with the featured collections, Seven Stories is holding a book display contest, in which indie booksellers compete to construct the best display showcasing the featured titles. Each winner is selected by the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA) and awarded $300. The wonderful winner from our first display, Curious Iguana in Frederick, MD, is featured in the photo above.

This initiative sprang from the question of how independent publishers can leverage their web presence in a way that also benefits independent booksellers. Eileen Dengler, the executive director of NAIBA, and Todd Dickinson, NAIBA’s president and the co-owner of his own indie bookstore, both believe that Seven Stories’s promotional indie partnership is a crucial first step to addressing this question.

Dan Simon, the founder of Seven Stories Press, said the idea for the promotion and contest materialized through conversations with Dengler and Dickinson about ways that publishers can support indies through their approaches to online sales. Dickinson said that of all the publishers NAIBA spoke with about possible partnership, Seven Stories “came back the strongest” and “were the most interested in developing some sort of pilot program” to support indies. Simon acknowledges that the promotional program may adapt over time, but he, Dickinson, and Dengler are confident that the collaboration will have a positive impact on indie booksellers.

From November 15th to November 22nd, seven “Books that Shook the World” will be featured on the Seven Stories website with a special offer: buy three of these books, and receive a fourth free. Just email sevenstories@sevenstories.com with your first and last name, and the book you would like sent for free. We'll verify that you bought three books already, and then get your fourth one in the mail!

Any book purchased through the Seven Stories website comes with a free e-book version, and anyone purchasing one of the titles from an independent bookseller can also get a free e-book by emailing a photo of their receipt to sevenstories@sevenstories.com. For booksellers competing in the November book display contest, submit a picture of the display to NAIBAeileen@gmail.com by 12/3/2018. This promotion is a great opportunity to discover your next favorite book, and to support the many indie booksellers committed to supplying us all with great works of literature.

How does one remember, publicly, a dear friend? Only very, very approximately. Losses like this are irremediable. You really need the person him- or herself, in the flesh, alive and kicking. Our memories, however vivid, are poor cousins to the real thing.

Juris was a founding member of the Seven Stories advisory board, joining other luminaries like Athol Fugard and Kurt Vonnegut. We’ve even brought the esteemed members together a few times, not annually, but like certain blooming desert plants, once every decade or so when the temperature is just right. But none of the other members, I can say with assurance, deeply understood, as Juris did, what an undertaking it is to do what independent publishers do every day across the globe, providing shelter and encouragement for writers and the whole clackity-clack machine of cultural production. And in Juris’s caring hands, that understanding was always expressed with a wink and an indulgent smile, and, ironically, in few words.

I was trying to explain to my sixteen-year old son the magnitude of the loss we have in losing Juris, minutes after I’d heard, and what I ended up telling him was how Juris usually made it his business to come to you. And when you think about it, this tells you everything you need to know about Juris. He was burdened by crippling heart disease, and the devastating nervous system effects of Agent Orange poisoning from his tour of military service in Vietnam. Those antagonists notwithstanding, he would suggest meeting on Christopher Street, at Fika, or at my home, all of which required him to get on the subway and put his body through something that I’m guessing was akin to another person coming to you walking on their hands.

When Juris and Jeannie decided to get married close to two decades ago, he called me a few days before and asked if I might be able to cancel my lunch plans so I could be his best man. And when my first company, and my life, was going over a cliff almost a quarter-century ago, Juris decided he would meet me once a week after work for a civilized drink at a bar with outdoor tables overlooking Union Square with all the tall trees in the park applauding in their stately way, an oasis Juris conjured up for me during those difficult months. This is a friend, someone who’s seen things, and who knows how to protect and cherish all the things in life worth protecting and cherishing, you among them.

There are many, many, many people with similar stories they could share about this man, large in his loves, large in his joy.

I am glad for him, glad that he made his mark as an independent publisher, in both senses of the word, both in corporate spheres and as an indie co-founder of the terrific house Soho Press, which he co-founded with Laura Hruska, and which has now successfully managed the difficult leap into the second generation of leadership under Laura’s daughter Bronwen. I’m glad also that he was able gracefully to transition from publisher to author, with two successful smart thrillers, and a third one we hope still to come. Juris lives, and many are we whose lives are better off because of him. Rest in peace, Dan

Happy belated birthday (it was the 18th) to Barry Gifford, one of America's most enduring and inspiring storytellers—in novels from Landscape with Traveler to Wild at Heartto The Up-Down, in pioneering oral history biographies like Jack's Book, and collections of stories and poems, constantly renewing the heart and the dark side of the American dream and the American reality.

You have to read this story. It’s the Ur epic—the Road Trip, Hero’s Adventure, bromance and home-coming all in one. In fact, there are several books out there delineating tropes and characters in the Gilgamesh that recur in Homer’s epics. And if Homer, well, then on to Ovid, Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Milton, and epic epic epic down to us—whether a Joycean Ulysses or a Coppola Apocalypse Now.

This story is not just in our blood, it’s in our marrow: it makes our blood. The Old Testament lifts actual lines from it. I’ll show you one place, in Ecclesiastes, a little later. Not to mention the Flood Story: not even Noah is that old. (I mean, the chosen patriarch and his family, and the animals two by two, the flood, the exploratory raven and doves, even the dimensions of the ark, occur in a Sumerian version of Gilgamesh over two thousand years before they do in Genesis.) [This pre-publication of the Bible’s exact words (more or less) played holy hell with the faithful in 1872 when it was first translated—God plagiarizing?!—but that’s another story. Maybe later.]

Elsewhere in this website, and in Kevin’s and my new (May 22, 2018) graphic novel of the Gilgamesh, I talk about how I came around to try a ‘translation’ of it. Maybe most cogently if not so succinctly in my Translator’s Note herein, which is a little academic but nicely balanced by Kevin’s Artist Statement—detailing a few of his tribulations with the artistic end of things.

Very briefly, I was teaching Gilgamesh along with Homer and Euripides &c., but I could never settle on a right translation of it. They’re either too wild and more about the translator than the translation, or the good ones, by terrific scholars, are so cluttered up with notes and half-readings and alternate readings that it’s the visual equivalent of singing an aria with severe heart burn.

So one day Dr. Dum-dum asked himself, What would he want? And so I did the first tablet, and saw that it was good, or at least a lot of fun, and a justifiable escape from grading papers. It went on from there, ever s o s l o w l y.

Somewhere I have a picture of about 20 translations and renditions spread out on the floor of my office and over every surface, with a foot holding one of them open and a finger on another on my desk, like a Rosemary Woods 18 ½ minute stretch, but, alas, can’t find it. But that was the routine: a dozen or so of the best translations laid out, and me taking a line or two at a time, memorizing its content, writing out what I then saw, and then enhancing my rough by selecting pieces of the best rendering of that same content—a word here, an idea there—from among the sundry choices, weeding them as I went of all their explicit if impressively meticulous scholarship.

And when dissatisfied or in doubt, or if they were in doubt, then I’d track down more translations, in other languages even. I set my parameters wide: anything that anyone had written, however far afield from my Heidel baseline (above), was fair game. Is est, meretrix, nuda sinum tuum

Why Heidel?

Alexander Heidel’s 1946 translation is dull and cautious and sometimes outright prudish—he renders the sex scenes (above) only into Latin! — but the English is, as far as I can tell, just about word-for-word with the original Akkadian. It is literal, or very close.

Every time I’d cobble more than two words together directly from the original—(I did get as advanced as noun phrases, plus one whole speech by the epic’s best philosopher)—I’d check them against Heidel’s and sure enough, that’s what was pretty much clunkily there. So with him at the center, I fanned out to everybody else, no matter how far off: their guesses and inventions were fair game. I didn’t abuse that ‘rule’ but it gave me the freedom to make many of the tough choices.

Like, just what are the “magic stone things” that Gilgamesh destroys at the river bank? Kevin came up with the idea of the pulley system. That covered a lot of translators’ angles on that infuriatingly elusive passage, which gets translated as everything from gods disguised as walking talking stones, to crumbling bridges, to Urni snakes, to Stone Charms to counter-weights or anchors or ballast for the boat. Lots of guesswork, all around. A Hittite version has them as merely ‘images,’ perhaps amulets to ward off contact with the instantly-fatal waters of death.

Now all this sort of thing constitutes a rendition, not a translation. I can’t read Akkadian, in the cuneiform script, except… given a single word or phrase, and the better part of an afternoon in the OSU or Univ. of Chicago library, with the 26 volume CAD dictionary, I could read it—one word at a time. I took a “Cuneiform by Mail” course from an Assyriologist at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, & learned to read around a 150 of the most common characters (out of a syllabary totaling 600 to 800 characters). Picture below is from some of my homework. (Note the teacher’s note at bottom!)

An aside: Somewhere else in here or in an interview in OPEN : Journal of Art and Literature, I describe what happened to my brain when I wedged this screwy ‘alphabet’ into it: it became a kind of monster of memory: I was able to direct my memory to childhood and on, and recall things that had totally evaporated. Memory as bicep: exercised with 20# barbell three times a day, 20 reps. Sha naq-ba i-mu-ru lu-se-id-di ma-a-ti/ [sha kul-la-ti]i i-du-uka-la-[ma-sal-m]i-s[u] . . .

There’s a lesson for all of us in that, I’ll tell you. Do those cross-word puzzles!

Take up that new language, get a part in a play, learn a musical instrument. Use it or lose it. Not only can you recall long-forgotten snatches of your life, piecemeal, you can sometimes—or I found myself able to—remember what came before and after those clips. That blackness around a fond memory has always haunted me. I was able to shine a light into it, and even around its edges, when I was wrestling with the likes of this stuff:

It's not an alphabet, per se. Those symbols represent what we call syllables. It's as if you had a huge list of hundreds of word parts: re-, -cede, pro-, -tion, inter-, -fere, tuli, latus, some seven or eight hundred of mostly mono-syllables listed in what’s called a ‘syllabary.’ Sometimes a character can represent a whole short word—a logograph. And there are plenty of pictographs, which are fun because they probably enact how we got to alphabetic characters in the first place. Like the ‘dinger,’ which is the second character in the picture above, which is used to indicate that a proper noun is the next word—it’s like capitalizing a letter—a direction, not a sound—and is a streamlined version of its earliest Sumerian self, which was a picture of sun and its rays:

So * or “sun” = god or other important name, alerting a reader that the next string of characters is a proper noun—name of a God, or River, or City, or King or personal name like Enkidu or monster like Humbaba.

And when I say ‘string,’ I mean like an endless noodle. There’s no punctuation, there’s no division between words. There is grammar, syntax of sorts, which remained pretty much outside my ken.

But the point I lost here is, with this mess of syllables and short words and stylized pictures, you sort of have to know them to read them; that is, to combine and recombine them to get to different words. You can’t really sound them out, like a kid’s halting kuh – aa – tuh, CAT! The scribes began training as children and spent their entire lives learning and refining these symbols, as well as impressing into damp clay an immense amount of verbiage, most of it practical & legal, though some in fun (parodies), and some, like Gil, really great art. Somewhere I’ve read that there is more untranslated Akkadian and Hittite and Sumerian and Urartian, et al., on tablets and fragments, than there is of all translated classical literature—Greek and Roman. I don’t see how that’s possible, but I did read it somewhere and it’s sometimes fun to imagine believing everything you read, is it not? Brave old world, that hath such lunatics in it.

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At Seven Stories and at our children’s imprint, Triangle Square, we believe in talking *up* to young readers, not down to them. That’s why you’ll always find works on our children’s list that both challenge and inspire. Check out seven select titles below! All of them are 35% off through October 2, 5PM EST. Each comes bundled with a free e-book edition, and there’s free shipping for all books within the U.S. (Please Note: All these books are 35% off! They are for sale for the lower of the two prices displayed above the buy buttons.)

Zinn’s first book for young adults retells US history from the viewpoints of slaves, workers, immi- grants, women, and Native Americans, reminding younger readers that America’s true greatness is shaped by common people, outcasts, and dissidents, not military and corporate leadership.

“This is the edition of A People’s History that we have all been waiting for.”—Deborah Menkart, Executive Director, Teaching for Change

The gripping story of globalization as told through travel, trade, colonization, and migration from its beginnings in the fifteenth century to the present. Here is the story of how sometimes the greatest leaps also posed the greatest threats to human advancement. 1493 for Young People provides tools for wrestling with the most pressing issues of today, and will empower young people as they struggle with a changing world.

Jared Diamond’s first foray into illustrated young adult nonfiction is both an explosive indictment of human nature and a hopeful case for a better survival.

“This is exactly the kind of book that should be a ‘set text’ for a reinvigorated science curriculum: en- gaging, thought-provoking and bang up to the minute. If your teachers aren’t recommending books like this —go out and get them anyway.”––Guy Claxton, author of What’s the Point of School?

From artist and Egypt specialist Tamara Bower comes her third, gorgeous book about Ancient Egypt. Using the classic style of Egyptian art, the book is painstakingly accurate in facts and illustrative style. Artifacts, funerary customs, kid-pleasing gory details of the mummification process, hieroglyphs, and details of life in ancient Egypt are told through the eyes of Ipy, whose father is embalmer to the King.

“Spectacular! The art is fabulous. The text is fascinating. This is going to be a classic.” —Dr. Bob Brier, Egyptologist, author of Egyptian Mummies: Unraveling the Secrets of an Ancient Art

Two nine-year-old Jewish boys survive World War II by banding together in the forest. They are alone, visited only furtively, every few days by Mina, a mercurial girl who herself has found refuge from the war by living with a peasant family. Adam and Thomas must learn to survive and do, and barely make it through winter’s harshest weather, but when things seem to be at their worst, a miracle happens.

“Adam and Thomas is at once a finely wrought fable and a realistic tale of survival—a tale of resourcefulness, of friendship, of the kindness of strangers, of the mysterious ways of fate. . . . Most of all it’s a story of generosity, one that suggests that the act of giving may be as necessary to our survival as food or drink. Thank you, Mr. Appelfeld, for the gift of this magical book.”––Julie Orringer, author of The Invisible Bridge

A comic book for kids that reimagines “sex talk” for the twenty-first century. Including children and families of all makeups, orientations, and gender identities, Sex Is a Funny Word is an essential resource about bodies, gender, and sexuality for children ages 8 to 10 as well as their parents and caregivers.

“You could send your kid to college and graduate school, and years of therapy, to learn how to lovingly come to terms with their gender and sexuality. Or you could simply read this book with them—it’s that thorough, and that good.”—Kate Bornstein, author of My New Gender Workbook

Trevor mixes humor and realism in an urgent look at what it is like to feel alienated from everything around you. And more importantly, what critical ties can appear at the most unlikely moment, to save you from despair, and give you reason to go on living. James Lecesne is co-founder of The Trevor Project, the only nationwide 24-hour crisis intervention and suicide prevention lifeline for LGBT and Questioning teens.

“Trevor is important because its protagonist does not represent a single character, but serves as a vessel for the joy, despair, and alienation that LGBTQ youth can encounter every day at school and at home.”—Porter Square Books Blog

Gary Indiana’s legendary novels HORSE CRAZY and GONE TOMORROW are finally back in print. Out September 18th, these long-awaited editions feature new introductions from Tobi Haslett and Sarah Nicole Prickett.

"[Horse Crazy] is a wonderful book. It really is a wonderful, beautiful, funny, breathtaking book. If it isn’t, then I don’t care for books that are." —Keith Ridgway

"[Horse Crazy] is what Love in the Time of Cholera is like for real." —Angela Carter

"Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels, Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It’s a philosophical work devised by a writer who’s both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life." —Dennis Cooper